Workforce Futures: Millennials Will Be the First Generation of “Flexapreneurs”

Surfing from workplace to workplace, Millennials have already had to navigate some of the most turbulent job market shifts for decades.

Gen Y might think they’ve seen it all, but big changes are just around the corner.  Tomorrow’s employment market is still bright for millennial workers.

Technology is disrupting everything

Almost half of all existing occupations in advanced economies are at risk of being automated over the next 20 years. With a powerful wave of technological disruption set to deliver driverless cars, artificial intelligence and virtual reality, whole job categories will disappear in what seems like the blink of an eye.

But as the global workforce is transformed in groundbreaking ways, entirely new roles will be produced in the process.

As the whole concept of employment changes, millennial workers will adopt a more entrepreneurial approach to work and demand flexibility.

Workers will become flexapreneurs

72 percent of the global working population will be made up of flexapreneurs by 2025. Workers who will seek work that awards them according to their productive output rather than their daily presence in an office.

According to IPAG Business School, freelancers in Europe grew by 45 percent between 2004 and 2013. They are the fastest growing group in the EU labour market.

Single-company careers have already been consigned to the history books, and tomorrow’s workers will take a task-based approach to employment, building themselves strong portfolios along the way.

Leaving the traditional office behind

A notable part of this transition will involve remote working and distributed teams. A trend driven by flexibility being a priority for millennials when choosing their workplace.

According to the 2016 Global Leadership Summit, 75 percent of workers worldwide will not work from a traditional office in future.

Workers may work from coworking spaces in other cities, or travel around as digital nomads who are never tied to one place for very long.

Millennials workers have different values

Experts predict that by the mid-2020s, workers will be motivated by a different set of values. The businesses of tomorrow will need to work differently to keep their most talented workers.

The most important factors for millennial flexapreneurs are having opportunities to learn and develop. Then, a work environments that are supportive and collaborative.

Everyday assumptions that have defined work and business will soon be challenged and many of them rejected. Over the next decade, the previously accepted attitudes and aspirations of the global workforce will change beyond recognition.